Prodigy (11 page)

“I didn’t know,” I whisper.

“Well, now you do,” Kaede replies. “Stick by her—you two are a good match, y’know.”
It makes her snicker. “Both so damn optimistic. I’ve never met such a sunshine-and-rainbows
pair of slum sector cons.”

I don’t respond. She’s right, obviously—I’d never dwelled on the thought, but Tess
and I
are
a good match. She understands intimately where I came from. She can cheer me up on
my darkest days. It’s as if she came from a perfectly happy home instead of what Kaede
just told me. I feel a relaxing warmth at the thought, realizing suddenly how much
I’m anticipating meeting up with Tess again. Where she goes, I go, and vice versa.
Peas in a pod.

Then there’s June.

Even the thought of her name makes it hard for me to breathe. I’m almost embarrassed
by my reaction. Are June and I a good match?
No.
It’s the first word to pop into my mind.

And yet, still.

Our conversation fizzles out. Sometimes I glance back over my shoulder, half hoping
to see a hint of light, half hoping I don’t. No light means that the tunnel doesn’t
run right under all the gratings in the city, visible to those walking by above. The
ground also feels slanted. We’re traveling deeper and deeper underground. I force
myself to breathe evenly as the walls narrow, closing in around me. Goddy tunnel.
What I wouldn’t give to be back in the open.

It takes forever, but finally I feel Kaede come to an abrupt halt. The echo of our
boots in the water sounds different now—I think we’ve stopped in front of a solid
structure of some sort. Maybe a wall. “This used to be a rest bunker for fugitives,”
she mutters. “Near the back of this bunker the tunnel continues on, right over to
the Colonies.” Kaede tries opening the door with a small lever at one side, and when
that fails, she taps her knuckles softly against it in a complicated series of ten
or eleven taps. “Rocket,” she calls out. We wait, shivering.

Nothing. Then, a dim little rectangle in the wall slides open, and a pair of yellow-brown
eyes blinks at us. “Hi, Kaede. Airship was right on time, yeah?” the girl behind the
wall says before narrowing her eyes at me. “Who’s your friend?”

“Day,” Kaede replies. “Now you better stop all this crap and let me in. I’m freezing.”

“All right, all right. Just checking.” The eyes search me up and down. I’m surprised
she can see much of anything in this darkness. Finally, the little rectangle slides
shut. I hear a few beeps and a second voice. The wall slides open to reveal a narrow
corridor with a door at its other end. Before either of us make a move, three people
step forward from behind the wall and point guns right at our heads.

“Get in,” one of them barks at us. It’s the girl who just opened the wall’s peephole.
We do as she says. The wall closes behind us. “This week’s code?” she adds, cracking
her gum loudly.

“Alexander Hamilton,” Kaede replies impatiently.

Now the three guns are pointed at me instead of Kaede. “Day, eh?” the girl says. She
blows a quick bubble. “You sure about that?”

It takes me a moment to realize that her second question is addressed to Kaede instead
of me. Kaede sighs in exasperation and smacks the girl’s arm. “
Yes,
it’s him. So knock it off.”

The guns lower. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. The girl who let us
in gestures for us to walk toward the second door, and when we reach it, she slides
a little device similar to the one Kaede had across the door’s left side. A few more
beeps. “Go on in,” she tells us. Then she juts her chin at me. “Any sudden moves and
I’ll shoot you faster than you can blink.”

The second door slides open. Warm air pours over us as we step into a large room full
of people bustling around tables and wall-mounted monitors. Electric lights are on
the ceiling; a faint but distinct scent of mold and rust lingers in the air. There
must be twenty, thirty people down here, and the room still feels spacious.

A large projection of an insignia decorates the room’s back wall, one that I immediately
recognize as the abbreviated version of the official Patriot flag—a large silver star,
with three silver V stripes below it. Smart to project it, I realize, so they can
pick up and move out quickly if need be. Some of the monitors show the airship schedules
I’d seen while onboard the
Dynasty.
Others show security cam–like footage streaming from officers’ rooms or wide shots
of Lamar’s city streets or video from the flight decks of airships right in the warfront’s
skies. One even has a short rotation of morale-boosting Patriot propaganda that reminds
me a little too much of the Republic’s ads; it says
B
RING
B
ACK THE
S
TATES
,
followed by
L
AND OF THE
F
REE
and then
W
E
A
RE
A
LL
A
MERICANS
.
Still others display views of continental America littered with multicolored dots—and
two of them show world maps.

I gape at this for a while. Never in my life have I seen a world map. I’m not even
sure if any
exist
in the Republic. But here I can see the oceans that wrap their way around North America,
the cut-up island territories labeled S
OUTH
A
MERICA
, a tiny archipelago called the British Isles, gigantic landmasses called Africa and
Antarctica, the country of China (with a bunch of little red dots sprinkled right
in the ocean around the edge of its land).

This is the
actual
world, not the world the Republic shows to its civilians.

Everyone in the room is watching me. I turn away from the map and wait for Kaede to
say something. She just shrugs and slaps me across the back. My wet jacket makes a
squishing sound. “This is Day.”

They all wait in silence, although I can see the recognition light up their eyes when
they hear my name. Then somebody wolf-whistles. That breaks the tension—there’s a
chorus of snickers and laughs, then most people go back to whatever they were doing
before.

Kaede guides me through the mess of tables. A couple of people are gathered around
some diagram, another group is unpacking boxes; a few are just relaxing, watching
reruns of some Republic soap opera. Two Patriots sitting in front of a corner monitor
are tossing challenges back and forth as they play a video game, racing some sort
of spiky blue creature across their screen by waving their hands in front of it. Even
this must’ve been customized for the Patriots, as all the objects in the game are
blue and white.

One boy snickers as I walk by. He has a shock of dyed blond hair spiked up into a
faux hawk, dark bronze skin, and a slight hunch to his broad, hulking shoulders, as
if he’s permanently ready to pounce. A chunk of flesh is missing from his earlobe.
I realize it’s the same person who wolf-whistled earlier.

“So. You’re the one who ditched Tess, huh?” There’s an arrogance about him that annoys
me. He looks me over in disdain. “Don’t know why a girl like her hangs with a con
like you. A few nights in the Republic’s prisons squeeze all the air outta your chest?”

I take a step toward him and grin cheerfully. “With all due respect, I don’t see the
Republic tacking up wanted posters with
your
pretty face on them.”

“Shut up.” Kaede pushes between us and stabs a finger into the other boy’s chest.
“Baxter, shouldn’t you be getting ready for tomorrow night’s run?”

The boy just grunts at me and turns away. “Still don’t understand why we’re trusting
a Republic lover,” he grumbles.

Kaede taps my shoulder and keeps walking. “Don’t mind that trot,” she tells me. “Baxter’s
not the biggest fan of your girl June. He’s probably gonna give ya some trouble, so
just try to stay on his good side, yeah? You’ll have to work with him. He’s a Runner
too.”

“He is?” I say. I wouldn’t have expected such a muscular person to be a fast Runner—but
then again, his strength might help him reach places I can’t.

“Yup. You bumped him down the hierarchy of Runners.” Kaede smirks. “And you once messed
up a Patriot mission that he was on. You never even realized it.”

“Oh? And what mission was that?”

“Bombing Administrator Chian’s car, in Los Angeles.”

Wow—it’s been a long time since I faced off against Chian. No idea the Patriots had
planned an attack at the same time. “How tragic,” I reply, searching the faces in
the room after Baxter’s mention of Tess.

“If you’re looking for Tess, she beat us here. She’s with the other Medics.” Kaede
gestures toward the back of the room, where several doors line the walls. “Probably
in the med ward watching someone sew up a wound. She’s a fast learner, that Tess.”

Kaede leads me past the tables and the other Patriots, then stops in front of the
world map. “I bet you’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Nope.” I study the landmasses, still boggled by the idea that so many societies are
functioning beyond the Republic’s borders. In grade school we’d learned that the parts
of the world not controlled by the Republic are just crumbling nations struggling
to get by. Are
this
many countries struggling to get by? Or are they doing well—maybe even prospering?
“What do you need world maps for?”

“Our movement here has spawned similar ones across the globe,” Kaede replies, crossing
her arms. “Wherever people are pissed at their governments. Kinda morale-boosting
for us to see it on the wall.” When she sees me continue to analyze the map with a
concentrated frown, she runs a quick hand across the middle of North America. “There’s
the Republic we all know and love. And that’s the Colonies.” She points to a smaller,
more broken-up spread of land sharing the Republic’s eastern border. I study the red
circles denoting cities in the Colonies. New York City, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Nashville.
Do they glow like my father said?

Kaede goes on, sweeping her hand up north and down south. “Canada and Mexico each
keep a strict demilitarized zone between themselves and both the Republic and Colonies.
Mexico’s got her own share of Patriots. Then here’s whatever’s left of South America.
This all used to be a huge continent too, y’know. Now it’s Brazil”—she points to a
large, triangular island far south of the Republic—“Chile, and Argentina.”

Kaede cheerily points out what the continents are and what they used to be. What I
see as Norway, France, Spain, Germany, and the British Isles used to be part of a
larger place called Europe. The rest of Europe’s people, she says, fled to Africa.
Mongolia and Russia aren’t extinct nations, contrary to Republic teachings. Australia
used to be one solid landmass. Then there are the superpowers. China’s enormous, floating
metropolises are built entirely over the water and have permanently black skies. “Hai
Cheng,” Kaede interjects. “Sea cities.” I learn that Africa wasn’t always the flourishing,
technologically advanced continent it is today, gradually filling up with universities,
skyscrapers, and international refugees. And Antarctica, believe it or not, was once
uninhabited and completely covered in ice. Now, like China and Africa, it houses the
world’s tech capitals and attracts a fair share of tourists. “The Republic and the
Colonies have such pathetic tech in comparison,” Kaede adds. “I’d like to visit Antarctica
someday. Supposed to be gorgeous.”

She tells me the United States used to be one of those superpowers. “Then came the
war,” Kaede adds, “and all their top thinkers literally fled for higher ground. Antarctica
caused the flooding, y’know. Things were already going downhill, but then the sun
went haywire and melted all the Antarctic ice. Flooding like you and I couldn’t even
imagine. Millions dropped dead from the temperature changes. Now
that
must’ve been a spectacle, yeah? The sun reset itself eventually, but the climate
never did. All that freshwater mixed up with seawater and nothing’s been the same
since.”

“The Republic never talks about any of this.”

Kaede rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on. It’s the
Republic.
Why would they?” She points toward one small monitor in the corner that seems to
be broadcasting news headlines. “You wanna see what the Republic is like from a foreigner’s
perspective? Here.”

When I pay closer attention to the headlines, I realize that the voiceover is in a
language I can’t understand. “Antarctican,” Kaede explains when I glance questioningly
at her. “We’re feeding in one of their channels. Read the captions.”

The screen shows an aerial view of a continent, with the text R
EPUBLIC OF
A
MERICA
hovering over the land. A woman’s voice narrates, and right at the bottom of the
screen is a running marquee of her translated words: “—to find new ways of negotiating
with this heavily militarized rogue state, especially now that the transition of power
to the Republic’s new Elector is complete. African president Ntombi Okonjo proposed
a halt today to the United Nations’ aid for the Republic until there is enough evidence
of a peace treaty between the isolationist country and its eastern neighbor—”

Isolationist. Militarized. Rogue.
I stare at the words. To me, the Republic had been portrayed as the epitome of power,
a ruthless, unstoppable military machine. Kaede grins at the expression on my face
as she finally leads us away from the monitors. “Suddenly the Republic doesn’t seem
so powerful, does it? Puny little secretive state, groveling for international aid?
I’m telling you, Day—all it takes is one generation to brainwash a population and
convince them that reality doesn’t exist.”

We walk over to a table with two slim comps sitting on it. The young man hovering
over one of the computers is the same guy who’d flashed Kaede a V sign on the railroad
tracks, the one with dark skin and light eyes. Kaede taps him on the shoulder. He
doesn’t react right away. Instead, he types a few last lines into whatever’s on the
screen and then slides into a sitting position on the table. I catch myself admiring
his grace.
A Runner for sure.
He crosses his arms and waits patiently for Kaede to introduce us.